That represents a drop in value of nearly 10 percent from the start of the year, but it has been an up-and-down-and-up-again ride. During the year, the shares have traded as high as $160 and as low as $109. In a word, it’s a volatile stock. The reason is that investors can’t seem to settle on what Salesforce is, and how to value it. The stock was killed yesterday — especially in after-hours trading, when it fell by as much as 10 percent — on disappointing quarterly results. And, frankly, management isn’t helping to clear up the picture one bit. More on that in a minute.

There was good news and bad news, but confusion appeared to reign over the minds of Salesforce investors, who couldn’t seem to get their heads around what’s going on with the company, and so assumed the picture must be bad. Because if it was good, it would clearly be unambiguously good, right? Today, they’re shaking it off: Credit Suisse lowered its price target on Salesforce from $140 to $135, but maintained a “Buy” rating. Deutsche Bank also maintained a Buy rating, and raised its target to $205, from $200. “Buy on the weakness,” argues RBC Capital Markets.

The Salesforce story is tricky. Revenue is growing, forward guidance is up; yet billings growth is slowing and cash flow from operations was down. As Brian Schwartz of ThinkEquity put it:

Salesforce reported mixed Q3 results as revenue, EPS, cash flow beat Consensus while billings growth of 29 percent missed both Consensus and our prediction for accelerating growth. The good news is that FY13 revenue guidance and Q4 billings guidance are well-above Consensus, which suggests strong business momentum, in our view, and should reverse a two-quarter slide of decelerating billings growth. However, billings grew slower than revenue for the second consecutive quarter and Q4′s guidance assumes this trend could continue for at least another quarter, with tougher comparisons ahead.

So, what is a Salesforce investor to think?

CEO Marc Benioff took to CNBC after yesterday’s results, appearing, as he often does, on Jim Cramer’s investor-tainment show “Mad Money.” Cramer — who has been known to admit on the air that, where Salesforce is concerned, he’s “drinking the Kool-Aid and likes how it tastes” — did his best to pepper Benioff with reasonable questions, which Benioff tended to dodge. Kicking into “master salesman” mode, he stuck to his well-worn argument that Salesforce is a company that has to spend money to keep growing. “We’re trying to aggregate market share and revenue, and we’re totally focused on top-line growth,” he told Cramer. “If we were a company focused only on earnings, we wouldn’t be growing as much as we are.” That, he said, would be “the wrong thing to do in our life cycle.”

Benioff also managed to lob a little grenade at his former boss, Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle. Cramer mentioned the September kerfuffle, during which Benioff was pulled from giving a speech at an Oracle customer event in San Francisco. Benioff instead crowed about winning videogame concern Electronic Arts as a new Salesforce.com customer, replacing Oracle.

So, then, how should investors evaluate Salesforce’s prospects going forward, using, say, a once-reliable metric like the number of customers, Cramer asks. That’s no longer a good indication, Benioff says. After all those acquisitions that Salesforce has made in the last year — Heroku, Radian6 and Manymoon — Salesforce’s base of customers is vastly different. Instead, he says to rely on the company’s guidance.

And that guidance is pretty good. Salesforce expects to bring in $3 billion in sales next year. Impressive, for sure. But with that sales growth comes growth in operational expenses, and a lot of effort and muscle are being put behind products with uncertain prospects — like Chatter, which Benioff routinely portrays as strategically important, but which has many competitors, including Yammer and Jive Software, to name but two.

Trust the guidance, Benioff says. Okay, but that’s another way of saying “trust me.” If that makes you feel a little uncertain, you’re probably not alone. The video clip of Benioff’s 10-minute TV appearance is below:

Unlike the “30 Rock” stab at social networking, the “South Park” guys don’t mess around with pretend names like “YouFace”–Stan, Kyle and pals are most definitely on Facebook in this one. Though for whatever reason, they do replace CNBC’s Jim Cramer of “Mad Money” with Cartman in this clip.

Cramer, you might remember, is chairman of TheStreet.com (TSCM), and among the company’s largest holders, with a 12 percent stake as of the company’s last proxy filing. After the close yesterday, TSCM got caught up on its financial filings; the online business news site had fallen behind due to some accounting issues. TheStreet, in effect, came back to the land of the living.

One thing that was clear from the filing is that the stock may have become artificially cheap, and as of yesterday’s close was trading below the level of its balance sheet cash. But faster than you can yell Boo-yah! the market has taken care of the problem.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

I know that “The Daily Show” host Jon Stewart does not need even more praise for his spot-on comic and very real jabs at the CNBC financial cable network and its milquetoast coverage of the financial crisis, pre and post.

The silliness that prevails too much over doing serious and rigorous reporting that Stewart takes perfect aim at is a major problem.

Taking CEO spinning at face value and letting them yammer on on air without being challenged much at all has always been excruciating to watch at best and woefully irresponsible at worst.

But, to my mind, the most important thing that he elicited out of CNBC’s most famous stock jester, Jim Cramer, was the part of the interview discussing using the malleable press to float fictional rumors about companies in order to make money on the negative news.

While Cramer at first tried to deny he did it, Stewart had the videotape of the “Mad Money” host talking about the practice, specifically in regard to Apple (AAPL).

His appalling idea to make a quick buck? Making it up that the mobile carriers did not like the iPhone right before Macworld, in this case in 2006.

“And this is very easy because the people who write about Apple want that story, and you can claim that it’s credible because you spoke to someone at Apple, because Apple doesn’t…comment,” said Cramer cavalierly, as if he was not talking about a way to essentially steal other people’s money and hurt Apple unfairly, to interviewer Aaron Task, then at Cramer’s own TheStreet.com.

“So it’s really an ideal short. And again if I were short Apple, I’d pick up the phone and I’d do that today.“

Bernie Madoff would be so proud, if he wasn’t otherwise imprisoned for life!

Kind of puts all those Steve-Jobs-Is-Dead-Right-Now rumors of a few months ago into a new light?

It’s been obvious that the legendary Apple CEO has been quite ill from his appearance alone.

But, as BoomTown has always maintained, the rumors written without any serious reporting about him were also a troublesome issue because it was that clear short-sellers played a large part in stoking the fear about his imminent demise, given how important Jobs has been to Apple.

(Although, this has not seemed to stop Apple from releasing a lot of really cool stuff of late, like the new Shuffle, which Walt Mossberg reviewed here.)

While Apple has not been adequately forthcoming, either, about the Jobs situation, that does not mean the press–as Stewart correctly points out–should not try to actually do its job and dig for what is really going on rather than just slap up unsubstantiated blather.

“It’s not a f@#*ing game,” said Stewart perfectly. Indeed not.

You can see Cramer cynically discussing the Apple stock manipulation tricks at the 6:45-minute mark of Part 2, but here is the entire Stewart well-deserved roasting of Cramer in three parts.

(And at the bottom is the Task interview with Cramer too.)

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

TheStreet.com Interview:

Plus, said Schmidt, Google’s attention is best focused where the real money is, or will be soon: mobile advertising. “We can make more in mobile than desktop, eventually,” Schmidt said. “The reason is because the mobile device is more targeted. Think about it: You carry your phone with you everywhere. It knows all about you. We can use that to do a very, very targeted ad. Over time, Google will make more money from mobile advertising.”